Continuing on Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in 20th Century America (1998). We talk more about Rorty’s description of the conflict between the “reformist left” and the “cultural left.” Do political-comedy shows serve a a positive political purpose? Can an enlightened political viewpoint really be a mass movement at all? Is it better to pursue specific political campaigns or be part of a “movement?” Can Rorty’s diagnosis cure Seth’s malaise?

On Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in 20th Century America (1998). What makes for efficacious progressivism? Rorty argues that reformism went out of fashion in the ’60s in favor of a “cultural left” that merely critiques and spectates, leaving a void that a right-wing demagogue could exploit to sweep in, claiming to be a champion of regular working people. Sound familiar?

On Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in 20th Century America (1998). What makes for efficacious progressivism? Rorty argues that reformism went out of fashion in the ’60s in favor of a “cultural left” that merely critiques and spectates, leaving a void that a right-wing demagogue could exploit to sweep in, claiming to be a champion of regular working people. Sound familiar?

Rorty claims that Kantians improperly read Kantian concerns (the connection between the senses and reason) back into the ancients. He thought that Sellars’s “epistemological behaviorism” was right on, and despite what you may have heard does not give a bad rep to animals and babies. Plus, psychological nominalism! Woo hoo!

Is a “theory of knowledge” possible? Rorty thinks that any such account will be a fruitless search for foundations. Knowledge is really just a matter of social agreement, and beliefs must be justified from other beliefs, not from any alleged relationship to reality.

Is a “theory of knowledge” possible? Rorty thinks that any such account will be a fruitless search for foundations. Knowledge is really just a matter of social agreement, and beliefs must be justified from other beliefs, not from any alleged relationship to reality.

Continuing on Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Part I: “Our Glassy Essence.” Rorty relates the immateriality of mind to the ontology of universals. Plus, the return of the semantic/syntactic distinction! With guest Stephen Metcalf.

End song: “Wall of Nothingness” from Sky Cries Mary from This Timeless Turning (1994). Listen to Mark’s interview with the band’s frontman, Roderick Romero, in Nakedly Examined Music ep. 9.

On Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Part I: “Our Glassy Essence.”

“The mind” seems to be an unavoidable part of our basic conceptual vocabulary, but Rorty thinks not, and he wants to use the history of philosophy as a kind of therapy to show that many of our seemingly insoluble problems like the relation between mind and body are a result philosophical mistakes by Descartes, Locke, and Kant. With guest Stephen Metcalf.

On Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Part I: “Our Glassy Essence.”

“The mind” seems to be an unavoidable part of our basic conceptual vocabulary, but Rorty thinks not, and he wants to use the history of philosophy as a kind of therapy to show that many of our seemingly insoluble problems like the relation between mind and body are a result philosophical mistakes by Descartes, Locke, and Kant. With guest Stephen Metcalf of Slate’s Culture Gabfest podcast.

End song: “Wall of Nothingness” from Sky Cries Mary from This Timeless Turning (1994). Listen to Mark’s interview with the band’s frontman, Roderick Romero, in Nakedly Examined Music ep. 9.

Philosophology is to philosophy as art history is to painting, Pirsig says. He uses that ridiculous-sounding word to draw a distinction between comparative analysis and original thought, between critical examination and creative production. In the tradition of Emerson’s famous 1837 speech, “The American Scholar”, Pirsig is calling for creativity and originality. This is not to say that the critics and Continue Reading …

Richard Rorty: A friend of Dan Dennett (and his dreaded scientism : ). A neo-pragmatist. An analytic philosopher who began teaching around the mid-20th-century, he eventually turned against its scientism. Rorty felt that 20th-century analytic thought was going down the wrong track by taking up the same sort of epistemological foundationalist project as Descartes. Rorty saw the narrow sense-data and Continue Reading …

Maybe the most famous current pragmatist is Richard Rorty. He doesn’t like William James’s redefinition of the word “truth,” but he thinks that virtually everything James said about it could be better applied to the word “justification.” Plus, you get to see subtitles in (I think) Dutch!

About The Partially Examined Life

The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

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